Friday, September 18, 2015

Obama Passes The Syrian Buck

by JASmius

Because nothing is ever Barack Obama's fault. That the Middle East has become a seething cauldron of chaos and violence and war can't be because of his pacifist, pro-jihadist policies in and for the region - now freshly lent a nuclear component. It simply can't be. Impossible.

[T]he White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

....to go in half-assed half-measures. There should never have been any silly "Syrian rebel training program"; the United States should have re-invaded Iraq and Syria as well and made a clean sweep of every enemy there - Assad, ISIS, Iranian influence....all of it.

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it....

Is that an admission from the White House that Obama never wanted to combat ISIS in the first place, but let them run wild across the region and the world? I wonder how many of us caught that.

....and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain…

IOW, he set up the "Syrian rebel training program" to fail so that it would, in turn, discredit the idea of resisting the Islamic State at all. Which is kind of obvious from the fact that they only trained fifty-four "students".

“How un-presidential that sounds — ‘We didn’t want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,’ ” said [former ambassador Ryan] Crocker, now dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. “It’s just indicative of their whole approach to Syria, which is not to have a policy. This is the worst thing they could say.”

But it is the most honest.

And I disagree with Ambassador Crocker that the Obama Regime doesn't want to have a policy. They absolutely do: To let ISIS run wild throughout the Middle East and the world. Which is what O has pretty candidly admitted.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has to go but the timing of his departure should be decided through negotiation.

Speaking after talks with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in London, Kerry called on Russia and Iran to use their influence over Assad to convince him to negotiate a political transition.

Kerry said the United States welcomed Russia's involvement in tackling the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria but a worsening refugee crisis underscored the need to find a compromise that could also lead to political change in the country.

"We need to get to the negotiation. That is what we're looking for and we hope Russia and Iran, and any other countries with influence, will help to bring about that, because that's what is preventing this crisis from ending," said Kerry.

"We're prepared to negotiate. Is Assad prepared to negotiate, really negotiate? Is Russia prepared to bring him to the table?"

No aaaaaaand no. Which Vladimir Putin has made abundantly clear.

Thus is the national enfeeblement brought by "smart power," that our diplomatic entreaties are no longer listened to because all of our enemies know that they're empty, with no credible threat of force behind them. Which gets us back to how diplomacy is only one tool in the foreign policy toolbox, and how they're all supposed to mutually reinforce each other.

John Kerry is an idiot and a buffoon, bloviating in a vacuum of his own making, the proverbial tree that falls in the forest but makes no discernable sound. And the ultimate results of it will be global war. It's just a question of when.

Lurch might want to ask Czar Vlad about that, since the initiative is entirely his.

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